Long known for its external secrecy, Google has been opening up lines of communications over the past year to the delight of SEOs and webmasters. About eighteen months ago, an anonymous character known as Google Guy began appearing at certain search-related discussion forums sharing information and answering questions. The experiment with the Google Guy persona was very successful and now one of Google’s top engineers, Matt Cutts is a regular contributor to several search related discussion forums.
Starting last week, Google has been sending notices to webmasters whose sites have been temporarily removed from its index for violations of Google webmaster guidelines.
Dear site owner or webmaster of [url removed],
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [link]
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from [url removed] are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.
Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages: On [url removed], we noticed that pages such as [url removed] redirect to pages such as [url removed] using JavaScript redirects.
We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion request at [link]
You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and then “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking,” click Continue, and then make sure to type “Reinclusion Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Over at Threadwatch where the story first broke, Matt Cutts confirms that these notices do come from Google stating, “Google is trying out a pilot program to alert site owners when we’re removing their site for violating our guidelines. JavaScript redirects are the first trial, but we’ve also sent a few emails about hidden text, I believe. This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing or what that ‘Make thousands of doorway pages for $39.95’ software was doing.”